Posted by Skrud at Friday, February 9th 2007 at 8:27pm
Kathy Sierra at Creating Passionate Users is looking for stories about how the web (or some other app) changed people’s lives. I was writing this up in an e-mail to her project when I realized it would make a good blog post, too.
There are two instances of huge importance that I can think of.
The first story one dates back to … oh, early spring 2003, on the ol’ IRC. I used to be an operator in a heavy metal IRC channel. At the time, I was 19 years old and just finishing up my CEGEP curriculum, planning to attend university in Computer Science in the coming fall. By chance, I was discussing my future goals in the IRC channel with one of the channel’s regulars, “FiG”. I mentioned that I would be heading to Concordia University in Montreal. His response was something along the lines of “No way! I’m the president of CCSS: the Concordia Computer Science Society! I can get you free beer! Come by our tent at Frosh or drop by the office some time!”
On the first week of school, I made sure to drop by the CCSS office where I met not FiG, but some other geeks. We had a friendly chat, and I continued to drop by there regularly, eventually meeting FiG. I started participating in all their events (camping trips, coding competitions, etc.). The following year (even though I had transferred into a “Software Engineering” major as a direct result of CUSEC 2004’s influence) I ran for a VP position and got elected. We were shorthanded a few executives so I actually took up extra work myself. I networked and befriended people all across the university, including students in various disciplines as well as the faculty members. I brought in speakers and recruiters from local companies (Ubisoft and EA, for example). My efforts even got me a faculty-wide award “for outstanding contribution to Student Life”. The year after that I was President of CCSS, running the society myself with a team of executives. (I wasn’t a very good president, but that’s another story.)
I’m still heavily involved in student life at my school, I’ve met some amazing people and have a wonderful group of friends. It’s reached the point where the thought of graduating actually produces tears – I’m going to miss everyone! And all this because of an IRC conversation almost 4 years ago.
As for FiG, we are still very good friends and talk regularly… which leads me to story number 2.
Around November 2003 I started a blog. There was a hosting company (1and1) which was offering a full-featured hosting package absolutely free for one year. It was just the excuse I needed. I bought a domain name (skrud.net) and set up a simple blog. As an afterthought, I installed a simple forum script and promptly forgot about it.
After a couple of months, people actually started posting in it. Edward was the first, and then a few more of my friends (including the aforementioned FiG, who also brought along his own friends). And then people started signing up whom I had never met before. These were people who were new to Concordia in some Computer Science or Engineering discipline and found the forum and blog by chance, by Google, or by looking over someone else’s shoulder in a computer lab or classroom.
Now the forum is a modest-sized community of friends, and even one professor. We get together every so often as a big group and take over a bar, restaurant, or house. The forum has become the online presence of my circle of friends – which has expanded to include friends from before and during university life – and it keeps growing! Some of my favourite people and best friends I might have never met were it not for the forum. And the cycle continues! A number of the newcomers to the forum end up becoming actively involved in student life; the people who ran as my team of executives when I was president of CCSS were mostly forum members.
And there you have it – the internet has played an extremely integral role in making me the person I am today. :)
Tags: geek, internet, life, metablogging | 6 comments
Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, February 6th 2007 at 12:00pm
I subscribe to a lot of feeds. According to Google Reader, exactly 65 of them. A lot of those feeds are the rarely updated blogs of friends (or in the case of Angelo and Heather, regularly updated).
The nice thing about Google Reader is that it has a “shared feed” feature, which lets me choose posts out of any of the feeds I’m reading and share them. Those posts get packaged together and displayed, even given their own feed). You can notice that little feed widget on the left side of the screen for my shared posts, too.
On top of the geek and programming blogs and webcomics, there are bunch of feeds I follow that are – for lack of a better word – uncharacteristic. At least, they’re feeds that you probably wouldn’t think I would read. I figured I’d profile them here…
Cognitive Daily
Cognitive Daily is a blog about cognitive psychology, published by Dave and Greta Munger. Greta is a professor of psychology at Davidson College and Dave is a writer. Together they report on peer-reviewed papers in the field of cognitive psychology – stuff like What we hear, how it affects what we see and Insight into how children learn cultural values.
I have no idea why I’m interested in this stuff, but I love it. I suppose on some level, my interest in the subject was piqued with Kathy Sierra’s presentation at CUSEC 2006 (listen to the podcast, though it’s not as good without the visuals). Kathy brought up interesting insights about how pleasing your users, and creating passionate users, is about understanding how humans think and feel and react. Although I know I’m more of a head-buried-under-the-code type of programmers and probably don’t think about users (other than myself) nearly often enough.
Deep Astronomy
I discovered Deep Astronomy thru Digg, when there was a post about How to Destroy the Earth with a Coffee Can. Astronomer Tony Darnell writes about various aspects of astronomy and cosmology, with a lot of tongue in cheek humour that makes it entertaining (and you learn a ton) – like How to Avoid Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation Sickness in which he describes the universe as “one very big microwave oven.”
Retrospectacle: A Neuroscience Blog
Retrospectacle is a very recent addition to my feed aggregator. I discovered it when there was a post on microscopic images of beer. Beer is extremely pretty up close. The blog is written by Shelley Batts, a 3rd year PhD candidate who researches hair cell regeneration in the cochlea, in the opes of using it as a therapy for hearing loss. She recently had a post about the basic concepts of hearing that was a great article about the ear and how hearing actually works.
Again, I have no idea why I find this stuff fascinating, but Retrospectacle is definitely an interesting and fun dose of science.
Seed Magazine - I Can’t Believe It’s Science
Astute readers will notice that two of the above three blogs are part of Seed Magazine’s “ScienceBlogs” section. Well surprise, surprise, I subscribe to Seed’s main feed as well. But the only thing I really read from this feed is Maggie Wittlin’s weekly ”I Can’t Believe It’s Science” column which documents interesting and weird sort-of-related-to-science things.
Tenser, said the Tensor
Named after a song from Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man, Tenser, said the Tensor is a blog about linguistics. Unlike more generalized linguablogs like languagehat – which I used to read – Tenser, said the Tensor focuses on linguistics in science fiction. One example is a post about the language of the Children of Tama in Star Trek: The Next Generation’s “Darmok” episode. Linguistics is a subject that’s always interested me to varying degrees. In fact, I probably would have gone into Linguistics or English Literature if I didn’t get accepted into Computer Science when I started university. (Just imagine! Skrud the linguist instead of Skrud the programmer!)
Mind you, I don’t think linguistics and programming are all that different. At some level, you’re still dealing with grammars, syntax and semantics. The only difference is that computer languages are context-free. (Mmmm… finite state automata…)
The Dilbert Blog
The Dilbert Blog is Scott Adams’ blog, and thusly named as he is the cartoonist behind Dilbert. Scott Adams is hilarious. His blog covers tons of things I’m not interested in at all (politics, philosophy, etc.) yet with the delivery of a stand-up comedian at a Just for Laughs gala. Sometimes he posts about current events and warns asexually reproducing Komodo dragons to stop giving our human women ideas. Or he’ll write about a gender test and how ridiculous a test like that might be.
TVInJapan
Finally, there’s TVInJapan. The best thing since prepackaged, sliced bread. TVInJapan is loaded with tons and tons of random, hilarious, interesting and often absurd clips from television in Japan. Clips can be loaded with Ultraman doing the Scatman, or the reproduced-everywhere Hand-made Star Wars. Sometimes there are television commercials with the infectious Tarako Cupie Girls or Superpowered School Girls. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Greased-up movers, Surprise crowds of 100 people chasing random pedestrians and much, much more. On TV. In Japan.
Unfortunately Japan is pretty anal about copyrights and those clips constantly get removed from YouTube, so in order to make sure you really get the most of TVInJapan you definitely need to subscribe to the feed.
And there you have it … a small subset of blogs that I read that have nothing to do with programming – though I guess they could still count as geek blogs given how heavily science-oriented they are.
Enjoy!
Tags: geek, internet, life, metablogging, reading, science | no comments
Posted by Skrud at Friday, December 29th 2006 at 7:03pm
When I was in NYC, Josh and I were really intent on finding a particular phone booth depicted in a classic cinematic masterpiece; Hackers. In more than one scene, the heroes are standing around a phone booth in New York’s Chinatown, using their laptops to wreak havoc and mischief directed at FBI Agent Richard Gill (aka “Hacker enemy number 1”).
The phone booth in the movie should stand out, since there was a Chinese pagoda sitting atop it, making for a pretty distinct-looking phone booth. So Lunchy & James, our native New-Yorker buddies, guided us around Chinatown looking for a phone booth that had a pagoda on top of it.
We couldn’t find any.
Upon closer inspection of the movie, I think I can figure out why:
In these screenshots, it’s pretty clear that the pagoda isn’t a permanent fixture on the phone booth at all. Instead it seems to be a little wooden prop that the filmmakers placed on the phone to make it look more … Chinatown-y.
In the second screenshot you can see a better view of the street. I’m pretty sure we were at the very intersection, at that very payphone, walking down that very street – only we didn’t notice the payphone’s significance due to lack of pagoda. I’m pretty sure that’s the street we walked on to get to this little restaurant that was supposed to have awesome soups, only to have it close exactly as we approached the front door.
Tags: geek, life, movies, nyc, travel | 4 comments
Posted by Skrud at Tuesday, December 26th 2006 at 4:36pm
We are pleased to announce a new version of Skrud to come out in 2007. This new Skrud will be leaner, faster and stronger than the previous version. The upgrade process will consist of eating a healthy diet, working out regularly and lowering alcohol intake. The lack of which has, over time, contributed to Skrud’s current pathetic physical condition.
You can help! Follow these guidelines to ensure that your new Skrud is delivered sooner, rather than later:
- If you offer Skrud a drink and he refuses, please don’t continue to insist on it.
- If you are out eating with Skrud, inform him of potentially unhealthy foods – at least until we are able to install the Nutrition Information Module.
- You may still invite Skrud out for fun drinking events, but do not be insulted if he limits himself to a paltry single drink, or if he doesn’t drink at all – at least until he gets his body in a comfortable condition.
- Continue to love and support your Skrud. Tips and advice are always welcome. (If you are met with whiny resistance, slap Skrud upside the head and say “Pull yourself together, man!”. Not too hard, please. Don’t take it personally, he knows you’re only trying to help.)
- Remember, he is still the same Skrud. He’s just trying to improve the way he feels about himself. Even if he’s sober, we assure you that you can still have a good time with Skrud around.
Thank You.
- The SkrudTM Engineering Team.
Tags: health, introspection, life | 15 comments
Posted by Skrud at Monday, December 4th 2006 at 7:58am
I’m copying this meme from Heather:
IF YOUR LIFE WAS A MOVIE, WHAT WOULD THE SOUNDTRACK BE?
- Open your music library
- Put it on shuffle
- Press play
- For every question, type the song that’s playing
- When you go to a new question, press the next button
(I have some 6384 songs on my iPod. It’s not as much as on my desktop computer but I think it’ll still make an effective demonstration)
- Opening Credits: Nyana by Tiesto
- Waking up: I Refuse by Falconer (how fitting)
- First Day at Highschool: Singers At The World’s Dawn by Ark
- Falling In Love: Beyond Salvation by Evergrey
- Fight Song: Hybrid Blues by Skyclad (something tells me this’ll be the fight scene where I go down in a blaze of getting my ass kicked, in the rain, and covered in mud)
- Breaking Up: Former Sisters by Terra Rosa (…wtf…)
- Prom: Ghost Love Score (Orchestra Version) by Nightwish. (So my prom is a giant epic period affair backed by a symphony).
- Life: Wishful Thinking by John Petrucci
- Mental Breakdown: Asteroid Dominion by Armageddon
- Driving: Cold Metal (Single Version) by Ambeon (“lying on my back on the railway / looking at the sky and its full moon / in the back of my head I feel the rolling wheels, shaking my memories” … eek)
- Flashback: Play Dead by HIM
- Getting Back Together: Savage by Cacophony (Hey, any relationship loaded with guitar solos is worth saving)
- Wedding: Into The Sun by Magnitude 9
- Birth of Child: Through the Ice Age by Kiuas (My kid is *so* battling vikings on the way out of the womb)
- Final Battle: Once in a Lifetime by Dragonforce (Fast. Triumphant. Rock on.)
- Death Scene: Suffocating Sight by Trivium
- Funeral Song: Forest of October by Opeth (It’ll be a long funeral)
- End Credits: Lake Bodom [live] by Children of Bodom (Best. End Credits. Ever.)
Tags: introspection, life, meme, music | 2 comments
